A Well-wrought Look At Defense Via `Star Wars`star Warriors

By William J. Broad Simon And Schuster, 236 Pages, $16.95

January 05, 1986|By Reviewed by Michael Kilian, a Tribune military specialist and coauthor of ``Heavy Losses, the Dangerous Decline of American Defense``

President Reagan has asked the nation, its allies and its Russian adversaries to sit still for the development of his Strategic Defense Initiative, the space-borne weapons system better known as ``Star Wars.`` A network of laser beams and other nuclear-triggered, directed-energy devices, Star Wars would supposedly be capable of knocking down any and all Soviet ICBMs in mid-flight.

Reagan is a simple man with a fondness for simple ideas of sweeping reach. He sees Star Wars as the ultimate military panacea--a system to make the United States invulnerable and render nuclear warfare obsolete.

William Broad`s ``Star Warriors`` sees the subject with much clearer vision, finding it breathtakingly complex and probably incapable of the mission Reagan asks of it. A science writer for the New York Times, Broad is a highly regarded expert on strategic warfare and a painstaking researcher whose effort shows in this concise, comprehensive and sensibly written work.

The book focuses on a week he spent with the mostly young scientists now laboring hard on ``Star Wars`` in the ``skunk works`` set aside for the project at California`s Livermore National Laboratory. The laboratory is headquarters of Dr. Edward Teller, nemesis of the martyred Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and famous as the ``father of the hydrogen bomb.`` Teller believes in Star Wars.

It is difficult to bring much high drama and human interest to the essentially tedious processes and arcane terminology of scientific

experimentation and research. John McPhee succeeded in his ``Deltoid Pumpkin Seed`` a decade ago, but McPhee is a writer who could make dishwashing seem fascinating. ``Deltoid`s`` principals were uniquely driven visionaries bent on a magnificent creation: a helium-filled airship that could fly like an airplane.

Broad`s Livermore wunderkind remain essentially grown-up versions of high school nerds memorable for buttoned collars and cuffs and pockets full of pencils and slide rules. Broad tries to make them interesting, and it`s intriguing that so many of them are products of the Hertz (as in rent-a-car)

Foundation. But one tires of reading of their beards and bluejeans, BMWs and Volkswagens and endless Chinese and Mexican dinners.

Broad is much better at explaining the Star Wars concepts and weapons themselves--their flaws and limitations, mind-boggling technology and awesome potential. His epilogue, in many ways the most compelling part of the book, concedes that the scientific community by and large disagrees with or tiptoes around Reagan`s ``Star Wars`` notions, seeing its military value one of intruding vast uncertainty into the Russians` nuclear equations. It`s perhaps best suited as a means of protecting now-vulnerable American land-based ICBMs. What`s most important about Star Wars to Broad`s inquiring mind is that such ``third generation`` strategic weaponry represents a bold, far-reaching step into a technological future as yet scarcely dreamed of, a future of space-borne eyes capable of finding small objects under bushes thousands of miles below and wafer-sized supercomputers working billions of times faster than the human brain. It is the prospect of rapid American development of such technology, rather than the deployment of space death rays, that has so spooked the Soviets and provoked their hysterical reaction to Star Wars.

There is a price to pay for such progress. Many fear it would be destabilizing and might invite a pre-emptive strike. A number of the scientists Broad interviewed see nuclear war as statistically inevitable, though they think their efforts may decrease the chance of one.

The financial cost is likely to be as awesome as the possible technological breakthroughs. Estimates of Star Wars` bottom-line price now range from $1 trillion to $2 trillion or more. The bill for merely orbiting equipment lifted by the space shuttle would alone run to $40 billion a year between 1995 and 2010, or about $600 billion. Broad`s own ``worst case scenario`` would have American taxpayers paying an average of $12,000 a household above the $3,000 a year taken by the government for existing defense budgetary needs.

Whether Americans are willing to hand over so much cash for such a futuristic purpose at a time of $200 billion deficits and a doubling national debt will likely be the central issue of an increasingly intense nationwide debate. It`s a discussion not to be embarked upon without first reading this valuable book.